Owl You Need is a Good Read

The Secret of Magic

Synopsis: While on a bus traveling through Alabama on his way home from WWII, decorated officer Joe Howard Wilson is ordered, along with the other blacks on the bus, to give up their seats for German POWs. Upset that having fought for the United States in the war hasn’t changed attitudes in the American South coupled with disdain for the Nazis he was asked to move for, Wilson refused. The bus continued on its way, but arrived at its destination minus one black soldier. Wilson’s body turns up two weeks later.

A few months or a year later (the timeline isn’t perfectly clear) a letter shows up at Thurgood Marshall’s office with the NAACP. One of the young lawyers, Regina Robichard, is surprised when she recognizes the sender of the letter as the author of one of her favorite books from childhood, The Secret of Magic. The letter urges someone from their office to come down to help with an investigation of Joe Howard’s death and Regina convinces Marshall that she should be the one to do it. Thus Regina, a young black woman lawyer from New York City, travels to the Jim Crow South to find a murderer.

Review: There’s no magic! Often I’ll request books months before their release after seeing them on GoodReads or in BookPage or somewhere and then by the time they come in for me, I’ve completely forgotten what they were about. That happened in this case. I got this book from the library and it’s called The Secret of Magic and there are fairy lights in the trees on the cover, so I assume something fantasy-ish, but instead I got murder. Which is fine – I like murder, but it’s a bit like thinking you’re going to eat ice cream and then it turns out to be frozen yogurt. Both are good, but my brain wasn’t quite ready. So here’s your warning: there is no magic in this book.

Other than the whole “no-magic” thing, I actually really enjoyed this book. I loved the character of Regina! She was such an interesting character. Her father had been lynched when she was very young and her mother had turned into kind of a crusader for civil rights, but Regina had never been outside of New York City. When she made her way to a small town in Mississippi, she was completely overwhelmed with the differences between the way the races were treated and how they interacted with each other. She had heard second hand about segregation, but what she didn’t expect was how there were black and white people everywhere. In New York City, people of different races stayed in their own neighborhoods and she had never really talked to a white person before. I think my favorite character, however, was Mary Pickett Calhoun. Regina was surprised to get the letter from this famous white author, especially when she reaches Mississippi and find that the lead suspect is the son of a former flame. The murdered man and his father had worked for and Mary Pickett’s family for generations, in fact, since before slavery was abolished, so she felt she had to do something to avenge the death, but was also just starting to come to terms with the town’s inherent bigotry. All in all, the murder mystery serves as a backdrop to a character study of small town Southern life in the late 1940s and its themes definitely stuck with me after finishing it.

The Book Owls is a blog devoted to all things books from four book-loving owls from the Midwest. We love our YA books, but branch out into all other genres. Get to know us below!

Madeleine roosts, reads, and writes from the Twin Cities. When not reading, she can be found working in a library.

Just like Nox's name suggests, when it comes reading, the darker the book the better. A NoDak native, Nox currently roosts in Wyoming.

Sonya reads and writes about books from her nest in North Dakota. She can often be found working at the library, reading, watching way too many different TV shows, or cuddling with her ridiculously adorable and badly behaved cat, Leroy.

Zelda may be the smallest owl, but her beautiful magenta plumage makes her the brightest. She loves to read YA fiction and is a lifelong Harry Potter fan.